memories of foster care

Happy reading friends!

Some context for this car convo: my parents fostered for 10 years & recently closed their license in the summer of 2022. They fostered about a dozen kiddos long term & many more touched our hearts & lives since 2012 & I’m sure many more will.

This afternoon I was sitting in the car driving my 9-year-old brother as we drove home from a playdate & he said, ‘I wish we still had kids at our house’. I asked him why he wished that and he said he wants someone to play with & imagine with and he has missed them ‘a thousands and a thousands times every day’. I smiled at his precious self in the rear view mirror and saw his distant gaze as he pet Rocket who was cuddled up next to him in the backseat.

I told him sometimes I miss all the kids that lived with us & it makes me so thankful that we have special happy memories to think about. I asked what he does when he misses them and he answered immediately that he likes to do something that makes him remember them. Color a picture, lay in bed and remember how they used to play together before bed, play their favorite songs on Alexa, pet the dog and remember the kids that loved Rocket and our previous dog, Comet. I smiled & noticed ambiguously that he trying to keep the tears welled up in his eyes and not let them fall down his cheeks. We moved on & chatted about our park adventures that day, our cousins, & how the Mariners won that day. I love his sweet heart & how is brain picks up these memories. A few hours before he had asked me to play a song on Spotify and he told me then that he asked to play it because he missed one of our previous siblings & he wanted to remember them.

I have memories of our many foster siblings every day, probably every hour - a song on the radio, a smell, driving past a place we shared a fun experience together, family gatherings, holidays with them. Grief, change, loss of the past and the possibility of what could have been. But there is so much more than that. The joy of the sweet connections as our childhoods crossed paths and will forever be in each other’s hearts. Mischievous playtime. My little brother named about a dozen precious memories from our previous siblings in the short car ride home. He brought up a few of my favorites. Baking with them. Vacation with them. Sitting in the hot tub with them. Shared meals & movies nights. Going to Gramma’s house with them. Walks & adventures & the time one of them fell in the water at the dog park. I would have missed these precious antics had not foster care brought us together. Last month, I started a bachelor’s program in social work. My simultaneously wonderful & broken childhood created some great joy & passion to make these hard things better. I chose this path because I am choosing to give myself grace to trust that God will use my experiences with the broken system to glorify Him & to love others. I am so thankful for my past experiences & to see how God uses these in the future. God has so much joy in our futures when we are living for Him.

Thanks for coming along with me with this heavier post. Vulnerability & trials have such a glorious opportunity to grow us.